> (9) America (and its allies) are actually engaged in a breach of
> international law. The US is engaged in indiscriminate murder.
Down the road of endless moralism we go... Military operations are an extremely discriminate form of violence. They have to be critiqued as policy. Railing on about the Great Satan Running Dog Imperialist Weasels (we'll call 'em GSRDIW for short) doesn't get us very far.
> * Use of military operations as a means to prop up global financial markets.
This has been the geopolitical norm since, um, Renaissance Italy.
> * In an Oct. 14 KPFA interview, journalist Tariq Ali noted that, according
> to his contacts, Turkey has already been pressed to assist the US in a
> possible invasion of Iraq in the next five months. (The US, the world's
> judge, jury and executioner, has made no attempt to conceal its expanding
> war.)
What the GSRDIW would like to do, and what the EU and East Asia will let them do, are two very different things. One must distinguish between what the ruling class says, and what it does.
> * In the Wall Street Journal, James Bandler and Marcus Walker exposed the
> direct and still active links between the Bush and bin Laden families,
They're oil/construction millionaires. We knew this already. Your point?
> "The FBI pointedly said -- early -- they knew about terrorists rotating
> through Rudi Dekkers' flight school. They leave hanging the question of why
> they did nothing to shut it down."
How could they? How could anyone know that S11 was coming? They were more worried that Bin Laden was training pilots for his business empire. But S11 lay in the future, and it's likely only the pilots knew the real purpose of the mission; the rest were hired muscle."
> Federal agents flash pictures at a South Florida bar of the two terrorist
> pilots who just a day earlier had demolished the World Trade Center. One of
> them drank Stolichnaya vodka for three straight hours, one bartender
> remembers.
That's exactly what most folks would do if they knew they were going to be charcoal the next day. The pilots weren't peasants from the periphery, they were thoroughly Westernized, with Western-style problems of committing acts of high-tech violence.
> Afghan route for Caspian oil" Of course there's also Arundhati Roy's article
> "War is Peace" which I'm sure you've seen.
Roy condemns the US bombing, but notes that it's likely al-Qaeda was indeed behind S11.
> JOHN J. MARESCA, VICE PRESIDENT UNOCAL in testimony before a House
> committee, February 12, 1998:"From the outset, we have made it clear that
> construction of our proposed pipeline cannot begin until a recognized
> government is in place that has the confidence of governments, lenders and
News flash: there's a ton of countries in the world happily exporting all sorts of oil, ranging from Norway to Vietnam. Just because Unocal would like to do a deal, doesn't mean bombs fall.
> been provided the information. None of this happened. The terrorists managed
> to walk through a wide variety of governmental firewalls, up the ramps to
> those aircraft, and into the cockpits unmolested.
Indeed. Noone foresaw what was coming. But government agencies routinely don't talk to each other, and the biggest mistake of all was that the authorities in the EU, who had a fair amount of info on the pilots, weren't routinely talking with their US counterparts.
The problem with conspiracy theories is, the assumption is that someone, somewhere, is actually In Charge -- an interesting variant of Weber's vanishing mediator, actually. The reality is that history is made by massive, gigantic, bumbling bureaucracies, bound up in historical constellations of power, which need to be carefully analyzed and decoded.
-- Dennis